A Schwinger process is the decay of an unstable field vacuum into a complementary
pair of real excitations that draws energy from the field and would annihilate, returning that energy,
if recombined. In quantum electrodynamics a strong electric field produces electron-positron pairs
in this way. We apply the same process to gravity, with curvature in the role of the field. The
complementary pair is then geometric: a positive-curvature well, whose geodesics converge, and a
negative-curvature tower, whose geodesics diverge, summing to zero. We show that the consequences of
this single property account for the discharge and graceful exit of inflation and for the post-inflationary
dark sector: self-trapped wells behave as cold dark matter, the residual tower background as dark
energy, and their common origin in compensated pairs makes the two comparable in magnitude. No
modification to the Einstein equations and no new particle species is required; the dark sector is
geometry. The framework assumes only that a gravitational Schwinger process exists—that curvature
dipoles can be produced this way—and derives the rest.
Publication Date: 2026-06-18